Netflix announced today what Deadline told you last summer. Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson are playing Texas Ranger Frank Hamer and ex-partner Maney Gault in The Highwaymen from director John Lee Hancock. This was the project that goes back far enough that it once had Paul Newman and Robert Redford ready to play those roles, before Newman’s health failed. Hamer and Gault came out of retirement to hunt down the notorious bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde. Shooting has begun in Louisiana. Casey Silver and his Casey Silver Productions is producing. Joining the lead lawmen are Kathy Bates, John Carroll Lynch, Kim Dickens, Thomas Mann and William Sadler.

The Highwaymen is written by John Fusco, Scott Frank and Hancock. Fusco, who originated the project and spent years tracking down the iconic lawman Hamer to tell his story. He will have his own take on that journey that Deadline will post right after this lands.

The lawmen were out of the Rangers by the time Bonnie & Clyde started their robbery reign, but were commissioned as special investigators, coaxed by a consortium of banks to assemble a posse and end the spree of the notorious gang reputed to have killed 13 cops and others. The details are different than the version depicted in the 1967 Arthur Penn-directed Bonnie and Clyde, which starred Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. Highwaymen takes the vantage point of the formidable posse headed by Hamer, an old-style Texas Ranger who’d survived 100 gunfights and killed 53 people.

Last edited by WyldeMan on 2/13/2018, 3:43 pm; edited 2 times in total

John Lee Hancock’s crime drama HIGHWAYMEN, starring Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson, has just begun production in Louisiana, and the cast has been joined by Oscar winner Kathy Bates, Kim Dickens from Fear the Walking Dead, Thomas Mann and veteran actors John Carroll Lynch and William Sadler.Based on a true story, the film follows Texas Ranger Frank Hamer and his ex-partner Maney Gault, who come out of retirement in order to hunt down the elusive Bonnie and Clyde.Hancock directs the film from a screenplay co-written by John Fusco with Casey Silver producing and Costner, Harrelson, Michael Malone and Rod Lake as exec. producers. They’re hoping to complete the film for a 2018 release by Netflix.Bates is currently on Netflix’s comedy Disjointed, while Dickens is a regular on AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead, which returns for a third season this summer.

Lynch recently wrote and directed the indie Lucky, starring the late Harry Dean Stanton, while Mann co-starred in last year’s Kong: Skull Island and has been a part of a number of coming-of-age films like Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and last year’s Some Freaks.